Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: Is Gaza Civilian Slaughter an Accident?

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Ray McGovern: Is Gaza Civilian Slaughter an Accident?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. to discuss with us whether the slaughter of 45 civilians in a Hamas refugee camp under a tent could possibly have been an accident, as Prime Minister Netanyahu claims. But we have some breaking news, and we'll get right to it. And that is threats on the ICC prosecutor by the Israeli Mossad right after this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123. If you have $100 in the bank, it still shows $100, but $100 in the bank is now worth 24% less. Inflation has reduced all of your savings,

all of your buying power, and mine, by 24%. And gold is largely immune from that. If you want to learn how gold will soon hit $3,200 an ounce, call Lear Capital, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Get your free gold report. Same experts who predicted the 23% rise that I've enjoyed have predicted this $3,200 an ounce gold. Learn about how to transfer this to an IRA. Protect your savings. 800-511-4620. Learjudgenap.com. Tell them the judge sent you. Ray McGovern joins us now. So shortly before we came on air, you informed me that the Guardian of London reported that the Israeli spy chief threatened the ICC prosecutor over the war crimes inquiry and actually sounded like it was Don Corleone saying, please do the right thing and we will take care of you. What can you tell us about this, Ray?

Well, Judge, these are despicable tactics. They were exacted upon the predecessor of Karim Khan, who is the British chief prosecutor now of the ICC. It's chapter and verse. The Guardian has very good sources. And they talk about warnings from the chief of Mossad, unannounced confrontation, stalking is what the Guardian says, to warn her, look, you know, your children and your family, and besides that, your husband, your husband, you know, we have stuff on him, so you ought to go easy on all this. Well, it didn't work.

She's from Gambia, and she's got guts, and so she decided to proceed ahead. So it was very difficult for Karim Khan, the new fellow to come in two years ago or so, and avoid prosecuting what are clearly war crimes. The marvel of this all is that everyone, including myself, thought that Karim Khan was in the pocket not only of the U.S., but of the Israelis, okay? And the Israelis indicated they thought this was a really good guy. So even he is no longer susceptible of pressure from the U.S. and the U.K. of the kind that Mossad exacted on his predecessor. We'll have to wait just about two or three weeks, I'm told, to see if this pre-chamber,

this pre-investigation that the chamber of the ICC is doing now, whether they issue an indictment. I think they will. And then of of course, Netanyahu and Gallant, the defense minister, and by extension, those who supported genocide, and you don't have to use your imagination to figure out who that is, will be liable for picking up wherever they travel under universal jurisdiction. And worst of all, our president has identified himself with a war criminal for the first time, well, since the UN was established overtly. I think he and his friends are afraid

that they might just suffer the same fate. One of our viewers who from time to time writes in during the show who calls himself Tommy Two Gloves says, quote, Ray calls him as he sees him. Well, that is true. You've been doing that for many, many years, including your long and storied career in the intelligence community. From that long and storied career in the intelligence community,

from your interaction with other members of other intelligence communities like the Mossad, does any of what you just reported, based on the Guardian reporting, notorious for having reliable sources and more than one source for what they print. Yeah. Surprise you. It does not, Judge. This is mafia tactics.

It reminds me, actually, and this will not take long, this analogy, before the war in Iraq, the U.S. and the US and the UK were desperate to get UN Security Council approval, okay? And so what they did was they surged their capability against members of the UN Security Council, particularly those non-permanent members like Somalia and other African countries that will be susceptible to this kind of pressure, right? How do we know that? Because one of the high-level senior guys at the National

Security Agency, NSA, his name was Frank Koza. We have his directive to GCHQ, which is the British equivalent of NSA, and it says we need to surge our capability against all these members, especially the non-permanent members in the UN Security Council, to make sure that they do what we want, okay? Now, what does that mean? Threaten? Well, it means collect dirt, as they have apparently on Kharim Khan's predecessor, the woman lawyer from Gambia, who for nine years was the chief prosecutor of the ICC and refused to lay off the Israelis for what they were doing, even before October 7th and this aftermath. So the idea was that, look, you surge this capability. NSA, of course, is electronic stuff. So you tap all the phones of all these ICC.

There she is. There is Fatou Bensouda, who would not relent and who was threatened. So you surge the capability on the phones, on the emails and all, and you get as much dirt as you can. Now, we know all this because a justice person happened to be working at the GCHQ, the NSA equivalent in Britain. Her name was Catherine Gunn. She said, oh my God, she's a good friend of mine. And she copied it, all right? And she gave it to the Observer in London. Now, the Observer in London is like, God, this is, what do we do? Oh, we have to- Probably prosecuted her under the Official Secrets Act.

She was, but she was let off because her lawyer said, all right, give us the legal opinions of how legal this attack was on Iraq. And of right, give us the legal opinions of how legal this attack was on Iraq. And of course, there were three legal opinions, and none of them stood up to close scrutiny. But the point here is that Catherine Gunn gave it to the observer, now the observer correspondent was following the rules, so he called it a NSA. He said, I'd like to talk to Frank Cosa. A little pause. We don't have anybody named Frank Cosa. So I had a secretary call that afternoon.

Frank Cosa, please. This is Frank. How can I help you? That's stupid. That was confirmed. It appeared in the Observer. It was on the front page of the Sunday edition. And when Catherine Gunn saw that, she said to me, I thought, O-S-S-I don't want to say the word.

O-S-S-I. And she said, it's going to be interesting. Now, they prosecuted her. But when her lawyer said, look, this is all bogus. It isn't legal. Prove that it's legal. And they couldn't prove it. So she walked.

She's a member of SAB. Back to these Mossad threats. Are they common? Or am I being naive? Well, the rigueur, I mean, when you have a target like this, you approach them. It's shameless. Three times, physically, the head of Mossad accosted the chief prosecutor and said, look, you know, we don't want anything really bad to happen to you, and you know, your husband, you know, we know about your husband, we're going to listen, here's some stuff on your husband, she said, I don't want to hear about it, she faced him down.

The wonder is that this Brit who came in, who, as I say, everybody thought would be in the U.S., in Israel's pocket, turns out to be, no, no, everybody thought would be in the U.S. in Israel's pocket, turns out to be he can't possibly avoid following in her courageous footsteps. And that's why we have an ICC application for an indictment. And that's why I think within two weeks we're going to get the indictment itself.

The indictment itself. And Netanyahu and Gallant and the three Hamas people will not be able to appear abroad without being in great danger of being arrested under the principle of universal jurisdiction. And the Israelis are complaining, not so much that Netanyahu may be indicted, but that he's being put in the same category as the Hamas leaders. If it had been just Netanyahu and Gallant, they would have pointed at Hamas. But because the court is planning to or investigating the indictments of both sides, the Israelis are complaining, you can't put us in equipoise with them. Of course, it depends on where you sit, which side of this

argument you're on. Go ahead, Ray. Yeah, well, you know better than I, but in a legal sense, there is a kind of equivalency in a moral sense. Forget about it. You raised, for example, the burning of tents yesterday or the day before. My God. Did you see those videos of the babies with their heads burned off? I never saw anything more repellent in my life. And yet it continues. with which to extinguish the fires caused by the israeli bombs because the idf had destroyed the infrastructure that delivers the water yes judge but remember now and i'm being facetious they got two hamas guys right they killed 45 others but hey the ratio is approved by the Israelis. That's how, what do they call it? Artificial intelligence, this algorithm or whatever you call it.

It says, all right, look, you get two Hamas people, 45, that's peanuts. Don't worry about it. Now, Juan Cole has a really good article out this morning talking about this is traditional, traditional tactics and strategy by a colonial power. Look at what we did to the Sioux, to the people in South Dakota. This is what we did. And there are photos, very early vintage photos

showing precisely what our armies, what our Union armies were doing in setting fire to the tents of the Al-Quala Sioux. Is there anybody who, I'm sure there's somebody, how can we expect to take seriously Prime Minister Netanyahu's claim that this was a tragic accident when we know that their decisions are made by AI, their programs called Where's My Daddy and Lavender, which often wait until the Hamas leadership targets are surrounded by many civilians, and then direct the computer to release the bombs. Who could possibly justify the slaughter of 45 people in order, innocent civilians, women, children, and men and boys, to get to two other people?

Might makes right, Judge. International law doesn't matter. These people have the upper hand and their objective is to exterminate the Palestinians or drive people left in Rafah or elsewhere in Gaza. Look, this is going to happen to you unless you move from place to place. It might still happen to you. Look what just happened two days ago. It's really the fact that, you know, the fact that Netanyahu himself has said to the Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor now, look, you better be careful. You better be careful. I mean, hello, talk about Corleone or the mafia. So you have the president, the prime minister himself saying these things.

It's not only moxie, it's chutzpah on steroids, and they don't care. They don't really care. Why? Well, you know why, Judge, because their main patron is bound to support them because of the upcoming election and the power of the Israel lobby in our country. Nicely put. Transitioning, the Times of India reports,

forgive me for reading, this just came to us, the biggest blow for the Ukrainian army amid intense fighting in the Luhansk region, Russian troops uncover Ukrainian arms cache with over 100,000 unused rounds of ammunition. Chris is running pictures of it now. The cash includes hundreds of artillery shells, anti-tank missiles, and projectiles. The loss of weapons for Ukraine comes at a time when Kyiv is battling an arms shortage. The big seizure will cripple the Ukrainian army's counteroffensive in Luhansk.

What will it take, short of moving up election day, what will it take for the West to recognize this effort to use Ukraine as a battering ram with which to drive Vladimir Putin from office has been a dismal, catastrophic failure and resulted in the deaths of half a million Ukrainians alone. Judge, the collective West so-called will not recognize this until November. It's a high political season in the United States. And what worries me is that the Biden administration has all incentive not to suffer a definitive defeat at the hands of the Russians in Ukraine. Now, the problem is that there is no one, no responsible analyst. That includes people very conservative who doubts that the Russians have just about won.

So the question is, what's in store for the next couple of months? Will the Russians still insist on negotiating with tin ears on the other side of the phone, or will they do more? The provocations are such now that I think Putin will be more tempted to do more than he has been in the past. We'll have to see, but they've been very explicit about what they're going to do if there are troops sent into Ukraine from NATO countries. And as you said before, Judge, and several of my colleagues have said, the Russians usually don't bluff. And just in support of that, I would remind people that Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the UN, admitted before the EU Parliament that the Russians, as he put it, they wanted us to pledge not to let

Ukraine into NATO. We said no. They said if you go ahead, we will invade Ukraine. We said no, and they invaded Ukraine. So, do the Russians, do the Russians Russians good on their threats? If it's if it's a core interest of theirs, if it's the same as the Cuban missile crisis was for President Kennedy, which I believe the analogy is quite apt, then they're going to do what they threaten to do. And my God, now they're exercising together with Belarus using tactical nuclear weapons. If that isn't a warning that will bring up the White House short, I don't know what is, but politics reigns here,

and I don't know what they'll do between now and the election. Here's someone whose analysis I think you have high regard for, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, talking about NATO striking Russia and Russia responding. Cut number four. Escalation that is pending will be the introduction of F-16s into Ukraine, which is now talked about for July. And I think that we're going to see some decisive moves by the Russians to prevent this happening because it would be precisely a kind of trigger for a serious escalation and the risk of direct conflict with NATO countries. He's right, isn't he?

Well F-17s have the capability to carry nuclear weapons. You can't always tell whether they're carrying nuclear weapons or not so the russians three months ago made very clear that if an f-17 gets up in the air we're going to shoot it down okay we're going to shoot it down and we're going to reply with an attack on the airfield from which it flew now Now, what about airfields in Ukraine from which these things might be able to fly in July or whenever? Well, the Russians are busy destroying those airfields, even as we speak. Just two days ago, they ripped up one of the prime airfields that would accommodate this kind of aircraft. So what does that mean? That means that if they're going to

make good on this pledge, these NATO folks, Netherlands and the others that are donating the F-17s, 16s, whatever they are, that they'll have to fly from other bases like, oh, maybe Romania, oh, maybe Poland. The Russians have threatened to hit those bases as well and to hit countries who might send foot soldiers into Ukraine, warning that, you know, not only they will be in jeopardy, but the countries, the bases, the bases of those countries from which they belong or to which they belong will also be targets for retaliation from the Russians. And that's not a bluff, I'm afraid to say. So you and Dr. Rowe are on the same page. Cut number five. teams are flying from Moldova, from Romania, or from Bulgaria into Ukrainian airspace and are attacking Russian positions, then I think it is entirely thinkable, entirely feasible, that Russia would attack a NATO country. Then what happens when Russia attacks a NATO country?

Does NATO really want a full-fledged war against Russia? Judge, I think the Russians are trying to make it very clear that this would be a very, very dangerous move. Now, would the Russians be using tactical nuclear weapons? No, not at the outset. They don't have to. They have hypersonic missiles that carry almost as big a punch, okay, where they can use those at will against European targets, even against European installations or even, God forbid, cities.

So it's not that the nuclear weapons will be used right away. That's just an ultimate warning. It's Europe that's really in jeopardy here. And I don't know why the Europeans are so slavishly follow what Washington says, because they first and foremost, if the French send in foot troops, if the Lithuanians do as well, number one, they're going to be killed in place. And number two, if it widens, it's going to be their armed forces, their capitals that are attacked by not nuclear, but hypersonic missiles that cannot be knocked down by any air defense program. And they should get that through their fat heads.

Now, the Russians have also warned, and this is important. A year ago, Foreign Minister Lavrov said, look, the Americans don't seem to understand. Under World War I and World War II, they were protected by two great oceans. That's no longer the case. Next time, they will not be protected. Next time.

Alistair Crook reports this morning that British generals have told Prime Minister Rasunic that Britain is already at war with Russia. And Prime Minister Sunak was so outraged to hear this, and so powerless, according to Alistair, to do anything about it, that he called a snap election for Parliament, which he hopes the Conservatives lose so that he can flee the country. I don't know if this is true or not, but would it surprise you to know that British generals are speaking in private like that? We are already at war with Russia. Well, that doesn't surprise me, but what surprises me a little is that the Russians are saying that. Top Russian leaders, you know, Lavrov, Medvedev, the former president, is saying, look, we're very close to World War III.

You got that? Put that in your craw and think about it. So the Russians are saying the West is at war with us. They're saying that openly now. So for Richie Sunak to be told the same thing, well, that's not so surprising. There's a war going on and the Russians are no longer playing Mr. Nice Guy. Although I would say that every other statement from Putin or from Lavrov says we're ready to negotiate on Ukraine. Please, just don't make us negotiate with that illegal president that you have there by the name of Zelensky. MI6 have a reputation for reporting accurately what's happening on the ground. I mean, stated differently, do British generals and does the British prime minister, however feckless he may be, do they fully understand that Ukraine is on its last leg from MI6 reports?

Or does the same thing happen with MI6 that does with CIA? By the time the report gets to their civilian bosses back in London, it's entirely spun to present a political narrative. The answer to your question, Judge, is no. And we can go back to right before Iraq, back in 2002, 2003, when whatever MI6 served up to its masters was massaged at the political level by Alistair somebody, not Crook, and it was given to Blair because they knew that's what Blair wanted to hear. So this is the same guys. And, you know, the officer corps, the generals and admirals now in the UK are just as, well, just as political as the ones in the United States. That didn't used to be the case. There's nobody going to tell Richie Sunak what the real story is. Wow. Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend. I know you have a commitment later this week. We'll miss you Friday.

We'll try and find three people to replace you. Have a good week. Thank you for accommodating. I know today is Tuesday. It seems like a Monday here in the U.S., but thanks for your time, my dear friend. We'll see you at your usual time and day early next week. Thanks, Judge. Of course.

All the best. Coming up at 11 o'clock this morning, Larry Johnson at 11.45. This morning, Colonel Douglas McGregor at two o'clock this afternoon, Matt Ho. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!